Identifying the most effective marketing channel for your organization, and understanding how to use it, is necessary for optimizing your marketing efforts. This resource delves into four widely used platforms with the greatest potential among district leaders: email campaigns, conferences, product certifications, and search engine optimization.
Conducting user testing and gathering data on resource and website interactions for each platform will enable you to tailor and refine your content. This strategy will help to guarantee user satisfaction and increase uptake of the evidence that you create or curate.
At a glance
Email campaigns
Learn how to craft and disseminate your marketing emails in a manner that increases the likelihood that school districts will read it.
Conferences
Determine how to leverage your conferences to improve your outreach success.
Product Certifications
Explore if certifications are right for you. Learn how to highlight the vendors that you approve.
Search Engine Optimization
Ensure that your websites are optimized to be easily discoverable by search engines.
Download a Postcard Summary
to Unlock Key Insights
Oftentimes, educators’ main barrier to utilizing evidence in their decision-making is that they are not aware of what is available to them. As a result, they fall back on using the same evidence they have previously used, limiting their adoption of novel approaches and products.
The most effective way to prevent this pattern is promoting evidence in spaces where decision-makers interact and look for information. This resource provides guidance on how to access the most impactful channels. Our research reveals that district decision-makers’ lack of awareness o of evidence sources stems, in part, from ineffective dissemination by evidence creators. A more comprehensive strategy should consider different dimensions of dissemination, such as opportune times, channels, and formats for distributing evidence to users.
The status quo bias describes our preference for the current state of affairs, resulting in resistance to change.3 In the context of evidence use, the status quo bias manifests itself in decision-makers reusing the same evidence. By making new information and its benefits more salient, evidence creators can overcome the status quo bias.
Framework
Format
What format of evidence is preferred by users (e.g. paper, pdf, audio, video)?
Channel
What channel is the most appropriate for dissemination based on the audience (e.g. email)?
Time
Whether there?is an opportune time to disseminate evidence?(e.g. start of the school year)?
Language
What languages are spoken/preferred by the intended audience?
Tone
Whether to adapt more formal, informal, or technical language?
Time
Double down on the following opportune moments throughout the school year to keep your organization’s resources at the top of district leaders’ minds:
At the start of a new term
At the beginning of the year
During designated adoption periods
After spring/fall break or other extended vacation
The fresh start effect is a strategy focused on using the anticipation of new beginnings to initiate new behaviors, such as catching up on resources even if new instructional materials aren’t needed.
In this instance, sending communications around these new moments can help to support evidence use.
Exercise
Planner for Timely Communication
Use this template to make note of which resources to promote and how for each window of time.
Fill the template
Complete the exercise by accessing our template. You can either download and use it online or print it for use with your team.
Depending on your evidence users’ demographics and the type of evidence, decide on an appropriate medium for outreach. You may consider using e-mails, social media posts, blog posts or a combination of those channels.
Disseminating evidence on social media, given its low cost and high reach, can be an effective method for targeting a broad audience. Additionally, listservs and newsletters, given their importance in education, can be useful channels for creating awareness about new resources.
You can also consider targeted advertising. Buying targeted ads is a way for evidence creators to present users with signals that reflect their specific traits, interests, and adoption behaviors.
Depending on your evidence users’ demographics and the type of evidence, decide on an appropriate medium for outreach. You may consider using e-mails, social media posts, blog posts or a combination of those channels.
This tool can help you to understand your user’s preferred channels and formats
Your communication should appeal to a wide audience and catch users’ attention, who likely receive hundreds of emails per day. Make sure that your message follows key principles of inclusivity and is communicated concisely.
Example engaging and inclusive message
Email Campaigns
There are two essential components of emails for evidence creators to consider:
When educators don’t sense that their evidence use is acknowledged, they may be less likely to continue engaging with that evidence.
One way to reduce this phenomenon is to send a note of appreciation to evidence users. By introducing a desirable stimulus such as recognition after evidence use, organizations are able to positively reinforce recipients to continue using evidence in decision-making.
Running an Email Campaign
When running an email campaign, it is important that your email is engaging and stands out from the large quantity that district leaders already receive from other users. TDL’s research has shown that warm emails – emails that come to district buyers from sources they are familiar with – are the most successful.3
Guided by key principles from the EAST Behavioral Framework, this resource provides a four step model that evidence creators can follow to inform their creation of effective acknowledgement messages.
Optional Exercise
Build a Database of Contacts
This template to create a database of contacts (or target users for your email campaigns) can be used across many contexts to collect contact information for various user groups, such as district buyers, EdTech vendors.
Fill the template
Complete the exercise by accessing our template. You can either download and use it online or print it for use with your team.
The EAST Behavioral Framework is designed to make communicating with stakeholders Easy, Attractive, Social, and Timely.4,5 Following this framework, evidence creators can send out personalized messages to users, conferring a sense of recognition, ownership, and self-efficacy.
Even though evidence creators may be cognizant of the utility of sending evidence users communications acknowledging their engagement, they often do not know how to craft these messages.
Guided by key principles from the EAST Behavioral Framework, evidence creators can follow clear steps to craft effective acknowledgements.
Easy
Messages should be clear and simple. Topics that are too complex or detail-oriented are likely to be ignored.
Attractive
Communications should be visually appealing. For example, you can boost the appeal of an email campaign by incorporating eye-catching design elements such as vibrant colors and graphics, ensuring a cohesive and professional appearance, optimizing the layout, and adding interactive elements to engage recipients.
Social
Messaging should emphasize how others are using a product or resource. By highlighting who participates in a desired behavior (e.g. using your resources), you can encourage others to do the same because people tend to adopt actions and beliefs as they become more widely accepted; this is called the bandwagon effect.6
Timely
Communications should be sent when people are most receptive to them, typically during periods of significant change.
Three Steps to Crafting an Effective Email
1 – Identify Your Audience
Think about who your primary audience is. Are they mainly comprised of teachers or educators from administrative roles, such as superintendents? This information will be useful to determine the tone of the message. For example, teachers might prefer more casual language whereas superintendents might prefer more professional language.
2 – Craft Your Email Body
Our research with evidence users revealed a set of best practices on connecting with them:7
Crafting an email copy with an emotional stimulus, coupled with a body that highlights the pragmatic approach of the product/service
Keeping the body of the email short (less than 300 words)
Making the call-to-action (CTA) explicit
Highlighting the positive outcome of their evidence engagement
Personalizing the email by addressing the participant’s first name and, if possible, how you have come to know that individual (in 1-2 sentences)
Sign off the email with an authoritative figure to bolster the sense of recognition
3 – Time Your Message
Having crafted your message of recognition, think about the optimal timing for sending it. At the beginning of the week and at the start of their day are effective times for sending emails to district leaders. Consider also timing these messages when decision-makers’ evidence user falters, such as in the middle of the school year or adoption cycle.
Example
Effective Email
01Personalize with the recipient’s first name and avoid mass emailing
02Leverage social norms to capitalize on peer influence
03Make the positive outcomes of behavior salient
04Use CTAs (calls to action) to add elements of interactivity and approachability
05Sign off with a senior individual to further bolster a sense of recognition
Conferences
Conferences are valued by district leaders and teachers alike as a resource for learning about new sources of evidence and organizations to support their purchasing decisions.3 Collective knowledge-sharing is a direct and engaging way to communicate findings to relevant, interested groups in the sphere of education. There are three general ways an evidence creator can be engaged during a conference.
Join social media conversations around target conferences via hashtags to connect with attendees on relevant topics to your products/services.
Disseminating evidence on social media, given its low cost and high reach, can be an effective method for targeting a broad audience. During conferences, social media is a common way audiences across sessions communicate about what they learn. Participating in these conversations is a timely yet engaging way to leverage conferences as a platform without actually making a formal statement.
Rent a booth, join a panel, or apply to present in sessions at target conferences and discuss your learnings / products / services.
The most common conference engagement strategy is having your team members present on panels during thematic sessions. This allows you ample time to discuss your learnings / products / services with an audience that has already expressed interest in your offerings by choosing to attend your session.
A more expensive but powerful approach from a marketing perspective is to sponsor an entire conference or host individual sessions/events within it. This has a two-fold benefit of making your logo and blurbs visible across all conference materials and solidifying your partnerships.
Product Certifications
Districts value products with credible and standard-aligned certification. TDL’s EdTech experiments highlighted that many districts seek out product certifications in their EdTech procurement journeys, which could have applications in the curriculum and professional learning ecosystems as other vetting processes are applied in these ecosystems that serve the same purpose as a product certification (e.g. rating or vetting vendors to highlight those that pass certain benchmarks). As such, certifications can be an impactful way to communicate signals of quality and to increase awareness of resources.3
Key features of product certifications
Below are key features of product certifications that TDL experiments have highlighted as important for increased engagement.
Visual and Clear
Use intuitive visual design and language to attract district leaders while making the purpose of the certification clear.
Informative
Highlight alignment with standards to make the certification more desirable to district leaders.
Actionable
Design certificates to require minimal effort from district leaders to meaningfully engage them.
Credible
Transparently communicate who contributed to your research and your financial independence from certified vendors to showcase credibility.
Search Engine Optimization
Ensure that your websites are optimized to be easily discoverable by search engines. About 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine like Google, Yahoo, Bing, or Yandex,7 and 75% of people never scroll past the first search results page.8 Effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) increases the prioritization of your content in search engine rankings.
Through the series of simple adjustments found here, you can share your content more widely without paid advertising and ensure that your websites are easily discoverable by search engines. By increasing the visibility of your website, you can raise online traffic and provide resources to a greater number of district leaders.
How does SEO work?
01
Crawling
Evaluate the usefulness of site
Search engines use programs (known as crawlers) to scan content and evaluate which websites are most relevant to the searcher. Crawlers determine the usefulness of a website by scanning characteristics like URLs, images, titles, tags, links, and videos.
02
Indexing
Content is indexed
Relevant content is then indexed by the search engine into its library of resources. If a user inputs a search relevant to your website, it can appear in the search results.
03
To uncover evidence use trends
Content in an index is ranked
Using system algorithms, content within an index is then ranked by how well it performs against other content. High performance can lead to more visible rankings in search results.
Example
01All pages that have been crawled and indexed will appear based on the search query of a user
02This page from homeschoolmath.net is prioritized by the ranking algorithm, partially due to its highly relevant content elements.
Content is constantly reviewed by web crawlers and retrieved when users make relevant searches
Boosting Site Traffic Using Content SEO
Content SEO involves optimizing the content on your website to improve its visibility in search engine results, enhancing organic traffic and relevance for specific queries.
Web usability studies have found that a user absorbs less than 3/4 of the content on a page.10 It’s crucial to write clearly and concisely to provide a pleasant user experience. Remember, return visits positively impact search ranking overall.
Look at your page from a user perspective: what search terms (i.e. words, phrases, or questions) will likely bring them to your page? You can also use tools such as Google Trends and keywordtool.io to identify common terms and phrases for your target audience.
Example
A Google Trends search of related queries on artificial intelligence
Incorporating keywords and phrases in your page titles, URLs, headings, etc. will boost your SEO ranking and increase your website traffic.11
Highlight these words for crawlers to discover by using bold, italics, heading tags and other emphasis tags.
Gain even more traffic for your content by sharing it on your social media pages.
Maximizing off-page SEO will attract more users12 to your content, thereby driving referral traffic (i.e. people who visit your page from other sites). Referral traffic has very positive effects on your organic search rankings.
ALT tags or alternative text descriptions are used to describe the images or videos used on a page.13
Search engines use these tags to locate pages, especially for users with text-only displays or assistive technologies like screen readers. You can find these in the backend of your website or get in touch with your IT personnel to assist you.
How to
Use ALT tags when using images on your page
Be accurate and concise. Avoid redundant language like “image of” or “graphic of”.
Meta descriptions – also known as snippets – are the small paragraphs below page titles that appear in search engine results. Including meta descriptions can dramatically improve your search ranking. You add these in the backend of your website or get in touch with your IT personnel to assist you.
Example
Meta descriptions, like the one in the box, explain the purpose of the page in a concise manner (the ideal length is 150-160 characters).14
There are three types of links:
Internal – Links between pages within your website
Inbound/backlinks – Links from other pages or websites that lead to your content
Outbound – Links on your page that leads to another page or website15
While all three links are important, backlinks provide the greatest benefit to your SEO ranking. They signal to search engines that a website is credible, as other sites are essentially vouching for its content. For this reason, backlinks are also referred to as a “vote of confidence.” However, the quantity of links that a page gets it not the only thing that matters. So remember to focus on writing relevant content so that related and credible websites will link to you.
Setting a schedule to audit your content is important. Regularly updated content is a strong indicator of relevancy, It signals to search engines that a website or platform is actively maintained and current, which can positively impact its search engine rankings. Search engines, like Google, prioritize delivering the most up-to-date and relevant results to users, and regularly updated content aligns with this goal.16
Summary
Given that the difficulty to find evidence is amongst the most significant barriers to evidence use, this tool highlights the four channels that district buyers use the most (email campaigns, conferences, product certifications, and search engines). This way, you can improve the ways in which evidence creators are leveraging these platforms to create awareness about their resources. Email campaigns and conferences are especially important strategies to incorporate in outreach efforts with district buyers.
Key Takeaways
The four highly utilized platforms with significant potential among district leaders are email campaigns, conferences, product certifications, and search engine optimization.
Time, channel, format, language, and tone are important dimensions of evidence dissemination regardless of the channel used.
Acknowledging user engagement positively impacts the continuity of their engagement.
Download Postcard Summary
Get summary and key insights cards for the core curriculum, ed tech, and professional learning segments.”
This project was built in partnership with The Decision Lab, a socially-conscious applied research firm that generates transformational change for people, products, and organizations using behavioral science.
Evidence Accessibility as a barrier
According to TDL research (2023), 70% of the 350 district leaders we surveyed reported that the most significant barrier to their district using evidence was it being difficult to find.2
Limited Awareness
According to TDL’s survey of 542 district leaders (2022), limited awareness of what information is available is one of the biggest challenges to districts, cited by 43% of core curriculum purchasers and 49% of edtech purchasers. Here is what some leaders told us:4
I don’t think people are very aware of a reputable tool/process out there.
— Chief Technology Officer, MN
I brought [EdReports] to my committee; before that, they weren’t aware it existed
— Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction, IL
Emotional Stimulus
According to TDL’s experiments (2023), emails designed with an emotional stimulus in the subject line achieved an open rate of 68%, outperforming emails with more simple subject lines (66%), or more personalized subject lines (64%).3
The beginning of the week is the best timing
Through a robust email marketing campaign experiment involving 3573 emails, we tested different concepts in the subject line and text of the body of the email.
TDL experiments indicated that district leaders are more likely to open an email when it is sent at the beginning of the week.3
EAST Framework
Developed by the Behavioral Insights Team (BIT) in 2012, the EAST framework provides a simple outline for different stakeholders to optimize their work using behavioral science.4 While EAST was initially designed to improve public policy outcomes, it has since been applied in other industries, too.
Conferences
TDL’s experiments (2023) have identified that conferences are the leading way for district leaders to gauge the quality of instructional materials and professional learning services.3
Conferences
According to TDL’s experiments (2023), lack of awareness of the certifications that exist is the first and primary barrier for considering/incorporating product certifications in EdTech purchasing decisions.3
Other concerns include
Not seeing a significant value in the certifications,
Not trusting the certifications,
Having limited time/money to meaningfully consider certifications,
Not seeing an explicit alignment to recognized standards, or
Having existing internal vetting process already in place.
Barriers for product certifications
According to TDL’s experiments (2023), lack of awareness of the certifications that exist is the first and primary barrier for considering/incorporating product certifications in EdTech purchasing decisions.3
Other concerns include
Not seeing a significant value in the certifications,
Not trusting the certifications,
Having limited time/money to meaningfully consider certifications,
Not seeing an explicit alignment to recognized standards, or
Having existing internal vetting process already in place.
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